Do we have to display the grid every generation, or just display the final generation?

02-01-2008

CornedBee

Only the final result is of interest. Otherwise, the contest would be about I/O speed.

02-09-2008

jEssYcAt

Well, considering the expertise of others here who will enter I don't think my entry has a shot of winning, but I plan to enter it just the same (it's actually completed, but I want to tinker with it a bit and make it "pretty", add some bells and whistles and whatnot). I don't know enough about Assembly to get under the hood and tinker with my compiler's output effectively.

Your comment

Quote:

Originally Posted by CornedBee

However, I will give out bonus points for solutions that do not use fixed-size grids. I'll just have to think of a fair and balanced way of adding that in.

got me thinking, and I plan to make my entry capable of simulating a board with millions of live cells without requiring gigabytes of memory.

I am just wondering when you will post some test input/output files for us to tinker with. I'm pretty confident that my implementation is working properly, but it would be nice validation to run an input file and have my program produce the correct output for x generations. Thus far I've done that by hand with relatively small test patterns, but I'd love to throw a puffer train at it and have the output match a couple thousand generations of simulation.

02-10-2008

CornedBee

5 Attachment(s)

You're right. Here are the reference files in steps of 500.

02-10-2008

CornedBee

2 Attachment(s)

And the last two.

02-10-2008

jEssYcAt

Woo hoo! My ouput matches at each stage, and it took only 15 seconds (counted outloud with "one thousand one, one thousand two" method) to run 3000 generations. =o)

Now I can figure out which bells and whistles I'm going to attach.

Thanks, CornedBee! Also, did you generate these or get them from somewhere? I did searches on Google but only ever found starting patterns.

02-10-2008

robwhit

Quote:

Originally Posted by CornedBee

Implementations based on hashlife are forbidden, sorry. This advanced algorithm is so superior that it would be pointless to compare it against the other possibilities.

Does this mean that any 2D pattern matching over time is out?

How close are we talking about "based on" here?

02-10-2008

CornedBee

Quote:

Also, did you generate these or get them from somewhere?

These were supplied by the university. But they generated them themselves.

Quote:

Does this mean that any 2D pattern matching over time is out?

The basic algorithm of hashlife is to identify larger patterns and predict their development. This is forbidden.